The first time I read Jenny Offill's book Dept. of Speculation, I raced through the fragments that built to a very moving novel. This time I brought it to my Corsica weekend to flip through and savour as bite-sized prose poetry. This picture was taken at the Iles Sanguinaire or Bloody Islands though they didn’t look as red as their name that day. Maybe I was just dazzled by all the book blue on Mediterranean blue.
Lines like these made my heart stop: "Sometimes the husband and wife run into each other in the park across the street. He is there to smoke, she to stare at the trees. He buttons the three buttons of her coat. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, she thinks."
We went on this gorge-ous hike near Neuchatel and kept expecting elves to jump out at us, gracefully of course. I mean could this get any more Lord of the Rings?! And then 30min later it did…
Finally finished The White Tiger at 1am the other night. Isn’t midnight the best time to read? The world is so quiet then, if only there wasn’t work the next day. Well, Aravind Adiga made my sluggish morning worth it. His book was dark, funny, disturbing, unexpected - sometimes all within one sentence. I especially liked how it’s structured as a letter to the Chinese Premier. Though of a very different style, it reminded me a bit of Lolita in how the reader accompanies the narrator through his growing insanity until you start questioning the reality being presented to you.